I hate to jump in when Justin is broadcasting great stuff from CPAC, but oh well. I've been given the chance to blog for arguably the coolest Mitt Romney blog and who can say no to that? For those of you who don't know me, I operate the blog President Mitt Romney and if you want to read more about me you can go here. I hope to add something of value and perhaps some legal and foreign policy analysis where appropriate. Having said that, here's a shallow post for you...

It has been suggested by commenters of My Man Mitt that Romney is only running for VP. For the following reasons, one serious and the other trivial, I have concluded that Romney can only be President. First, Romney sounds too Presidential. Put him side by side with other candidates and he is likely to cast a shadow over them. Which brings me to the next point. Romney looks too Presidential. I was trying to imagine how he would look side by side with other candidates but I could only find pictures of the candidates next to George Bush (of course, I used the pictures with the best camera angles for my point). Judge for yourselves.

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It is never good to state the obvious in my opinion. I do agree that MR is to be president and I do not for one minute think he has any other plans than making it all the way. But to do so, he must make it completely on substance, which I think he will.

For the record, I agree with everyone's comments. I would vote for whichever candidate I felt would do the best job no matter howPresidential they may or may not look. In no way do I mean to imply that Mitt's Presidential persona is a good reason to vote for him.

But it does seem to me that how candidates might look together as running mates is a fair political musing. A lot of discussion was generated about the Kerry\Edwards ticket related to this. Studies have consistently shown that how people look can affect how others view them. Check out this one on the SSRN:

"Are beautiful politicians more likely to be elected? To test this, we use evidence from Australia, a country in which voting is compulsory, and in which voters are given 'How to Vote' cards depicting photos of the major party candidates as they arrive to vote. Using raters chosen to be representative of the electorate, we assess the beauty of political candidates from major political parties, and then estimate the effect of beauty on voteshare for candidates in the 2004 federal election. Beautiful candidates are indeed more likely to be elected, with a one standard deviation increase in beauty associated with a 1½ - 2 percentage point increase in voteshare. Our results are robust to several specification checks: adding party fixed effects, dropping well-known politicians, using a non-Australian beauty rater, omitting candidates of non-Anglo Saxon appearance, controlling for age, and analyzing the 'beauty gap' between candidates running in the same electorate. The marginal effect of beauty is larger for male candidates than for female candidates, and appears to be approximately linear. Consistent with the theory that returns to beauty reflect discrimination, we find suggestive evidence that beauty matters more in electorates with a higher share of apathetic voters."